I talked with Emily Jungmin Yoon (@EmilyYoon), poet, translator, and doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, about her latest book, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets—a tiny anthology of translations just out from Axis Press as part of a series on “Translating Feminisms.” Our conversation began by considering two related statements Yoon makes […]
In this interview, James Shaw discusses with Wendy Chin-Tanner her brand-new book of poems, Anyone Will Tell You. Their conversation covers fertility and infertility, motherhood, and the struggle of two miscarriages. They also unpack how Chin-Tanner’s experience writing a graphic novel influences her poetry, the role of nature in poetry, the practicing of keeping a […]
In this interview, Andrew Gillis asks the poet M.E. Silverman (@MESilverman_BLP and Blue Lyra Press) about his most recent book, The Floating Door, particularly regarding Silverman’s fascination with Zablon Simintov of Afghanistan, the thought process behind choices he made in his poetry, and how Jewish life in America compares to Jewish life in Afghanistan. Silverman also […]
Let us consider two scenarios, both of which begin the same way: Emily has worked for Soap, Inc. for seven years. She has very few coworkers of color. All of her bosses are white. Every once in a while an overtly racist incident will happen—like when someone pitched a commercial of a black woman washing […]
“My Passion for Literature Succumbed to Reality,” writes Bianca Vivion Brooks in an op-ed in The New York Times. While Brooks loves majoring in English—the reading, the writing, the thinking, the discussions—her family sacrificed for her to go to college and count on her to help out after graduating. She needs a decent, steady income. […]
Ravi Shankar’s just-published book The Many Uses of Mint presents new and selected poems from twenty years of his writing, including from the Norton anthology he co-edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. The poet Lisa Pegram and I recently sat down with Ravi over video chat to […]
I am writing an essay that celebrates the groundbreaking work of the late Robert Scholes (1929-2016), one of my favorite literary and pedagogical scholars, whose books, especially The Rise and Fall of English (1998) and The Crafty Reader (2001), influenced me a great deal during graduate school and continue to influence me to this day. But as […]
In the video below, I sit down with David Mura—teacher of creative writing and author of at least ten books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and craft criticism—to discuss his new book: A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing. In both the book and our conversation, Mura speaks with insight, clarity, and grace on: […]
In the video below, I chat with Patricia Roberts-Miller, PhD, about her recent book Demagoguery and Democracy. Although as a scholar of rhetoric or specifically “of train wrecks in public deliberation,” Roberts-Miller has written a number of academic tomes (and in fact has a scholarly version of this one forthcoming), she wrote this as a little […]
In this video, Hal Bush and I discuss his new novel, The Hemingway Files, which takes readers on a tour of Japan and of American literary history, asking, along the way, such questions as “How can we know the ‘Other’?” “What’s the worth of words?” “What are truth and beauty and meaning?” and “How do traumas shape […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: In my English Composition I course, I have started asking students to experiment with how they read, first reading a book (James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time) as they usually would, then rereading that same book while trying out my advice for how to read deeply, then writing a comparison and contrast essay […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: My World Literature course asks students to find creative, meditative ways of working with texts from around the globe. In fall 2017, Kylei Strahan took Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Path”—a fascinating, bizarre, deeply multicultural text, written by an Argentine writer, set in the UK, revolving around a location in France, […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Notes: In my World Literature course, I invite students to practice reflective, meditative, contemplative ways of reading. The idea is to slow down, pay attention, and listen. A wide range of creative responses lend themselves to this work, including painting (which I’ve written about). The time spent painting in response to a text […]
Around the age of twelve, Frederick Douglass was sold from a plantation in the countryside to a family in the city of Baltimore. His new mistress set out to teach him to read, and got through the alphabet, until her husband made her stop. “[I]f you teach that nigger . . . how to read,” […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Emilee Rosell took her very first (English Composition II) and very last (World Literature) college classes with me as her professor. She’s now graduated with a BA in English. In this reflection essay, she looks back on what she learned in that last class, and throughout college. I cannot say how inspired and encouraged I […]
My friend and former student Danielle Bonilla asked me for my take on “white privilege.” This phrase, which Peggy McIntosh famously unpacked in her 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” has received a lot of attention lately, positive and negative. In this post, with Danielle’s permission, here are her questions and my responses. What is your perspective on white privilege? “White privilege” is […]
“ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin #Racism – When your society divides people into “races” based on arbitrary factors like skin color or ancestry and ascribes different worth to the different groups #Prejudice – When you have negative thoughts or feelings toward people of another race or ethnicity […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: In U.S. Literature in Spring 2015, Raeanne Watkins created the following images in response to John Okada’s No-No Boy and John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Okada describes experiences of Japanese Americans after the WWII internment, while Steinbeck offers a parable, set in Mexico, about poverty and wealth. I find Ms. Watkins’ images striking on their […]
A review of scholarship. by Paul T. Corrigan 1. Introduction In late modernity and postmodernity, many aspects of traditional religion have become intellectually and morally untenable. Among the most pressing of these are the patriarchy, homophobia, and antisciencism that so often come with traditional religion. At the same time, however, many contemporary writers, religious and nonreligious, […]
Many people do not realize that Jesus was quoting directly from the Book of Leviticus when he said to love one’s neighbors as oneself. This context lends an important layer of meaning to his words. Often his saying is reduced to an encouragement to “be nice” to others. While not a bad admonish as far as it goes, that interpretation […]
William Bartram—the naturalist who effectively missed the American Revolution because from 1774-1777 he left his home in Pennsylvania and traveled through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—had a vast knowledge of ecology, including plants, animals, soil, landforms, and weather, which he demonstrates in his book on that expedition, commonly known simply as his Travels. If the glossary in the Library of […]
Corrigan Literary Review 